Thiemo’s Weblog

It must have been 2009 – eight years ago – when I stopped working on our Glow game project for various reasons. But I could never stop thinking of it. These days I finally made a backup of the abandoned Windows machine that still holds the development environment. I found tons of unreleased stuff, including large hero renderings of the in-game characters and enemies. But even if this is something I promised to release next, this is not where I wanted to start. Instead I dug up the tool chain I build in C# and Delphi 9: A generator for grass tiles, roots, debris and such. Others for waving flags, water falls and rain. A random map generator that is also capable of rendering nice overview maps. I updated all tools and fixed the most obvious reasons for them to crash, added examples, a build script for Mono on Linux (I love how that just works), as well as a CC-BY-SA license.

One thing I learned while doing this was that I changed the XML formats the game internally uses, shortly before I stopped working on the project in 2009. The change was totally worth it (I got rid of literally millions of string comparisons), but now I have levels as well as configuration files in two formats lying around, and basically my entire tool chain only supports the older one.

Don't do that. Think of the consequences first, map your tool chain, carefully plan the migration, and then do it fast. Don't wait eight years.